86% mass discount

I think you should remake your calculations using t3 air factory and continental or strat bombers in case of non UEF.

Then you take total cost of all massfabs and factory and power generators to run factory and massfabs and how much mass you get from that and then compare that to t2 massfabs + ras sacus.

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@zeldafanboy said in 86% mass discount:

Mass Fabs are almost never worth it in most circumstances. That sounds like a juicy target for strat bombers though

I think SCU RAS causes this, it is safer option. I think either SCU RAS should cost more or make Fabs cheaper and use less power.

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do you guys try this outside dg before posting ?
has any of you used that and felt like it was someting impactful ?

queuing with a newbie to show him the beauty of tmm and meeting tagada be like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLcRpdZ0Xb0&ab_channel=Tomoko

I think the key thing people are ignoring is the roll off time. With adjacency bonus you can't assist the factory. So you have the time it takes to build the mass fabs + the roll off time giving your opponent plenty of time to gain an advantage.

@angelofd347h said in 86% mass discount:

I think the key thing people are ignoring is the roll off time. With adjacency bonus you can't assist the factory. So you have the time it takes to build the mass fabs + the roll off time giving your opponent plenty of time to gain an advantage.

i think more importantly people are missing that land facory only is consuming about 20 mass or so while air factory making strats is consuming 32 for continental and 30 for strats so since it is better to use air fac rolloff is not that big of an issue

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I think it is the most efficient mass per second to make air scouts from the air factory and reclaim them. Yolo- Mega Crusher told me about it years ago. Still not practical.

@zlo They require too much energy

@zlo if you make strats or continentals, the system becomes 55% more efficient

so what?

that only amounts to about 25-30 mass/second which is still not big enough to be worth doing

I would want to see something like a single factory generating 100-200 mass/second to justify the investment in power, mass fabs, and APM

It's true you could scale up to 200 mass/second if you had 8 air facs doing this, that would be 200 mass/second and it wouldn't take much more APM than for a single factory

But that means building 32 t3 mass fabs and enough power generation to support them

@melanol said in 86% mass discount:

@zlo They require too much energy

I disagree.

Each of the 4 mass fabs require 1500 energy/second, that's 6k total, not counting the t2 mass fabs.

The air factory needs 1800 energy/second for a strat or 1200 energy/second for a Continental

So the ratio of energy cost compared to the amount of mass generated is actually worse for T3 mass fabs without pgen adjacency (16/s, 1500 e/s), than it is for spamming continentals without pgen adjacency from a factory surrounded by mass fabs (25/s, 1200 e/s)

it's true you could get some savings by adding pgen adjacency to your mass fabs (obviously you can't get it for your air factory), but if you can afford to run 4 T3 mass fabs, it's not much more expensive from an energy standpoint to have a factory making continentals on infinite repeat.

Moved to General Discussion

@melanol I think to understand this more you should make a graph of total Percival count. One player makes Percivals as fast as possible, the other builds this mighty mass discount grid. By the time the grid is complete and the first Percival rolls off the assembly line, how many will the player who was just building Percivals the whole time have?

@Rezy-Noob Yeah, I tried it on dual gap reborn and it worked great! 😂

You must deceive the enemy, sometimes your allies, but you must always deceive yourself!

Check out how useful the 80% discount is on DualGap: https://replay.faforever.com/18287108. I produce a lot of bricks while constantly overflowing and donating everything to eco (and you are supposed to to win late-game on DualGap). So, basically, when a factory discount goes a bit beyond 20% (T3 fab gives 20%, T3 mex gives 12.5%), I don't stop production, as it becomes mass generation and I can reclaim if needed. In the end, I have around 15 factories producing bricks.

I also build T3 pgens far away, because you only need factories, fabs and shields there (maybe UEF SACUs with 50k projected shields could help save space instead of structure shields).

So, it feels like this strategy work best on bigger maps, as it takes time to build the infrastructure and on smaller maps, you need to somehow survive early experimentals.

P. S. Bricks aren't total crap underwater due to their HP, discount, and immunity to battleship ground-fire.

@melanol said in 86% mass discount:

DualGap

How useful is it on any other map? At this stage of the game mass is not important anymore, but time and BP.

@magge If you want build power, you can just build 1 T3 factory with 80% discount and never stop producing engies that you can reclaim if needed.

Engs are never going to cut it, hives are crucial. Maybe this works for <1k ELO games with passive enemies, but after a certain ELO threshold you will see a complete different meta.

@magge I am now talking about non-DualGap maps, and you don't always have engstations.

I want to see a army of bricks under water take out a good sized navy

I think this would be usefull on setons to spam t3 maa if air is lost lategame or to spam hoverflak
Massfabs absolutley are worth it on setons, the payback time is not that long for t2 fabs

It's useful in any scenario you wanna keep on spamming armies and scaling eco. Are there other ways to do it? Sure there are. It's just one of them that might be efficient as hell mass wise but lacking in other parts like base cohesion or just BT requirements.

So just like always, it's a game of what suits your needs at the moment.

Surrounding a t3 factory with t3 fabs is a terrible waste of their adjacency potential, even if you are getting effectively 'free' units late game you have much easier eco options such as mass fab templates or especially RAS com spam which doesn't require destroying and reclaiming your own units!

Using a grid to make units is efficient but once multiple t4s are on the field then t3 armies start to struggle.

A much more interesting use of t3 fabs would be early in the t3 phase to scale your unit production harder, using the opposite layout with a single fab surrounded by factories. Making percies or bricks the fab would save nearly 20 mass total a second, in addition to the generated 16 you are net 36 mass, which is two t3 mex upgrades!

Admittedly you need to power the fab and it probly wants a t2 shield if your team doesn't have air. So need an early t3 pgen - or possibly ACU RAS could work.

You can even get funky and include mex adjaceny:

adj.jpg

Here you are effectively getting three t3 units for the price of two. It is pretty rare to get a layout for four mexes, but three is pretty common and you can do two with any single mex.

Four storages would give 3 mass but here are they are saving nearly 10. Again this relies on you constantly building units to get the benefit, but it is not true that assisting the factory will reduce the adjacency - you will still be saving the same mass per tick than you would unassisted, it is just that you get more units in the time and so the mass saved per each one is less.

What will kill your efficiency is stalling mass, if you are the kind of player who stalls for half their total income at this point in the game you are going to lose a third of your adjacency bonus, and should probably just build the storages and t3 mexes instead 🙂